Working with Something Great Marketing

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The internal work stack we use at our marketing agency

To run a successful digital marketing agency, you need to be on top of your tech stack. We’re constantly testing new tools that will give both us and our clients a leg up on the competition.

In this guide, we’ll give you a quick rundown of the tools we’re currently using at our agency. We’ll update the list from time to time as we experiment and add in new tools, but as of today, here are a few of the tools we use to stay organized, to communicate with clients, and to create incredible content experiences for our partners.

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Internal messaging

• Slack
• Mimestream

To stay in touch with our internal team at Something Great, we prefer to use Slack. The video recording options and deep search functionality are the two main features that give it the nod over Discord in our opinion, which would be our second tool of choice.

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It also allows us to easily connect with external organizations. Many of our clients already use Slack, and can directly message us from their own internal channel.

For e-mail, our team uses Mimestream, a native MacOS client for Gmail. It allows us to monitor multiple inboxes at once, and the user experience is just a bit better than what you get in your standard Gmail inbox.

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External messaging

• Loom
• Zoom

Most of our interactions with clients, outside of Slack, in-person, phone calls, and emails, are conducted on Zoom. But we truly love Loom, and use it frequently to show our clients progress, and communicate updates while being conscious of their time.

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Email Service Providers

We use multiple. Email Service Providers (ESPs) offer different features that benefit our clients in different ways. Our favorites, depending on the situation:

• Substack
• Beehiiv
• MailChimp
• ConvertKit

Yes, we recommend every one of these depending on your goals. Talk to us about which is right for you.

Notable mention: For one of our clients, SparkLoop has been an incredible referral service. It plays really nicely with ConvertKit in particular.

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Internal database

• Notion

Notion is our second brain here at Something Great. We use it as a CRM, for taking and keeping meeting notes, as a content calendar, social media calendar, project manager, idea bank, and running to do list. Notion can really be anything you want it to be. That versatility is why we love it.

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Design tools

• Figma
• The full Adobe suite of products
• DaVinci Resolve

We use these every single hour of every single day. They’re phenomenal products. Read on if you want to get nerdy with us.

We use Figma for website design and some social posts - especially ones that are text based. The Adobe Suite on the other hand helps us do anything that requires a bit more finesse. We use Adobe Illustrator when creating logos and branding for companies, and for additional files that need vector outputs. We use Adobe Photoshop for any compositing needs (blending together multiple elements) and creating unique designs where Figma just doesn’t quite cut it.

We love InDesign for its strength in text manipulation, giving us an edge when creating next-level corporate decks and print layouts for magazine ads. And finally, for all photo color grading, we love Adobe Lightroom Classic for getting the most out of our professional photography assets.

For all linear editing purposes we love Adobe Premiere for compiling timelines, creating snappy edits, and constructing basic animations and sound effects. When it comes to creating more complicated animations, Adobe After Effects is our go-to for giving us complete creative control of any special effects like keying out green screens, and creating lower thirds or custom motion graphics. And lastly, to give our videos the final touch of polish, we use Adobe Audition for sound clean up and design, and DaVinci Resolve for professional color grading on our video projects.

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Website tools

• Webflow
• WordPress
• Shopify
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs

Each of these has it’s benefits and drawbacks, however. We have been recommending Webflow to more and more of our clients—the website you’re on right now was built with Webflow. We find it fits many of our clients needs, and the websites come out looking fantastic. If you need a fresh new website, don’t hesitate to reach out. Here's a little bit more on why we're the top recommended Vancouver Webflow Agency on Webflow's directory right now.

We also wanted to mention two SEO/SEM tools, SEMrush and Ahrefs, both of which are well worth their price tag. For PPC check out the former, for organic SEO, the latter.

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Social media tools

• Sprout Social
• Later
• Buffer

Sprout Social has a few significant advantages to other social media schedulers. For customer service, it’s best in class, allowing us to respond to messages, comments and tags in real time. You can monitor brand mentions, schedule all forms of content, and create approval workflows that you simply can’t set up in other schedulers.

That said, it’s pricy. So in some cases, we recommend other options. Later and Buffer are perfectly suitable for the needs of many brands, so we use them for some accounts, and they work just great, too.

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AI tools

• Grammarly
• ChatGPT

No, we didn’t use ChatGPT to write this blog. But we do use it for a host of things.

It’s a fantastic tool if you need to bulk format information, for example. We’ve been handed email lists from clients that need to be reformatted for upload to ESPs, and ChatGPT can make light work of these kinds of tasks. We use it to help with prospecting for new clients, for formatting emails we send out in the Weekly Forekast, to find coupon codes for the software listed in this article, you name it.

If you’re looking to use ChatGPT to streamline some of your day-to-day tasks, give us a shout. Grammarly is another fantastic tool that’s now incorporated a lot of AI into its offering. It makes sure our they’re, their, and there’s are always right.

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Calendar

• Notion Calendar (formerly known as Cron)
• Forekast

Everyone on our team uses Notion Calendar. Join meetings with the push of one keystroke, add Notion files to events in your calendar, monitor multiple calendars. It’s fantastic. The only thing we don't like is the new logo. Bring back the Cron orange!

We also use Forekast to stay on top of trending events and holidays. It syncs top events to our team’s calendars, helping us with content inspiration, post opportunities, and bringing more joy to our calendar experience in general. We built the tool in house, in case you didn’t know, and run the Weekly Forekast newsletter. It's a Monday morning rundown of the best events coming up in the week ahead. Subscribe here.

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Grab bag

A few additional tools we also really like

• Meco for reading newsletters
• Miro for storyboarding
• Arc as a web browser
• Opal for deep work

And that just about does it. If you have any questions about the tools listed above, or how they can help your brand grow, let’s start a conversation.

Happy tooling!